Research

I'm a graduate student in the Strategy and Organization Area of the PhD Program at the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University. My supervisor is Samer Faraj. 

I'm fascinated by expertise in organizations, and the many ways in which it is conceptualized in the literature and in practice. I have a three intertwined streams of inquiry related to expertise: First, I am interested in exploring the role of expertise enactments in organizational primitives such as decision-making, coordination, control, and innovation. Second, I'm interested in how expertise arrangements influence the societal and organizational construction of emerging technologies, and how such technologies in turn produce new forms of expertise. Third, I'm interested in expert discourse and how vocabularies and grammars can shape expertise.

Please see my Google Scholar page for recent publications. My current research is organized into the following projects:

Coordinating expertise in extended crises

This project is based on a qualitative field study of how a frontline hospital coordinated an organization-wide response to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Preliminary findings reveal how local, unit-level expertise enactments are managed at the level of the organization. This project has produced two conference proceedings.

Artificial intelligence in the operating room: Doing expertise and expert systems in healthcare

My doctoral dissertation research monograph  is based on a qualitative comparative field study of OR scheduling and AI technology development at two hospitals. Preliminary findings suggest a crucial role of local expertise arrangements in shaping early instantiations of "expert" technologies. This project has produced two conference proceedings and is featured in a symposium on AI and Expertise I am helping organize at the 2024 Academy of Management annual meeting.

An ecology of knowledge in expert communities

This early stage project explores how knowledge emerges, is inherited, and evolves across a dynamic expert community. The source of the analytic metaphor driving this project is the single stranded RNA virus, the only category of life where ecological and evolutionary processes unfold at similar timescales. 

This project is associated with the knowledge artifact JRNLS.  Prototypes of this artifact have been used by senior scholars and students to conduct machine-assisted literature analyses, including one featured in  Faraj, S., & Leonardi, P. M. (2022). Strategic organization in the digital age: Rethinking the concept of technology. Strategic Organization, 20(4), 771-785. JRNLS will be added to my existing open-source contributions.